I've run the maths and this cover is about 23% relevant to the interior.
There are so many problems with this comic that it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s try the title.
As the name suggests, this is a cross-over between secondary X-Men titles Cable and X-Force. I bought it for the Cable parts, a series which I’m (belatedly) following and enjoying to a decent degree. X-Force I couldn’t really give a toss about. There are two things wrong with the title though. First is that X-Force gets top billing. Why’s that a problem? Well, although this collects issues of X-Force as well as Cable, it’s not really about those characters. They’re in it and participate in the plot, but said plot almost entirely revolves around elements from Cable. The X-Force characters pop into Cable’s situation in a literal diversion from the ongoing story in their own comic. It should be Cable/X-Force. The other problem is calling it Messiah War. That’s a perfectly sufficient name, in theory. Trouble is Marvel already realised that and used it for the first volume of this Cable series (where it was woefully inaccurate). This means that if you’re following Cable in trades you need to read Messiah War, Waiting For The End Of The World and then Messiah War. Hmm.
The other glaring issue with this collection is that it’s chocked full of fairly crap art, which makes it a pain in the arse to follow and unpleasant to read. The main perpetrators of these crimes are Ariel Olivetti, Clayton Crain and Larry Stroman.
Olivetti is the regular artist on Cable and at first glance is a fairly good artist. His characters are well rendered and on occasion emote fairly well. Thing is, Olivetti doesn’t do backgrounds. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – a lot of artists over the years, some quite famous and/or talented, haven’t done their own backgrounds. It’s often a practice employed by ‘superstar’ artists with their own studios, where they can get an impressionable young artist looking for work to pick up the slack (or in Pat Lee’s case, get someone else to do all the work and not get any credit for it). Instead of getting another artist to do his backgrounds, however, Olivetti uses photographs. Not very good photographs either. Comic art drawn on photos generally looks quite odd, which can be a boon if odd is what you’re aiming for. Cable isn’t though, so Olivetti fuzzing, graining and blurring photographs for all his backgrounds doesn’t work at all, especially when he’s having to rejig their dimensions to fit. The worst element of this practice is that it means his characters never actually feel apart of their environment (which, if an intentional authorial device, is a pretty basic one) and thus can’t interact with it to the degree required for the story to function. At one point, Cable and X-Force look down from a rocky cliff at a near-by city/structure thing and act like it’s recognisable. Which it isn’t, because it’s a fuzzy, indistinct mess.
Olivetti does most of the Cable issues contained within, but is thankfully relieved for majority of the first two by Jamie McKelvie. McKelvie’s a British artist who made a name for himself on indie title Phonogram. He has a ligne claire style that incorporates a lot of emotion and acting, thus giving his characters actual character. This is handy, as his issues are the first in the series that feature Cable’s ward Hope as a proper character. Up til now she’s been a baby or toddler, acting as little more than a plot device. Here, she’s somewhere around 7 or 10 and not only gets to talk properly, but gets some 1st person narration captions of her own. Although writer Duane Swierczynski depicts her personality well in the dialogue and monologue, McKelvie’s art really makes her come alive and feel like a real character.
The X-Force issues are drawn by one of that series’ regular alternating artists: Clayton Crain (the other, superior regular artists, the team of Mike Choi and Sonia Oback do the Messiah War one-shot wedged between the McKelvie issues of Cable and the cross-over proper). Crain is a digital artist, creating all his work as rendered pseudo oil paintings in Photoshop (or similar). His work can be best described as ‘murky murky gloom murk’. It is next to impossible to tell what the hell is going on in most of the panels of his issues. Following the fight scenes properly would require X-Force writers Kyle and Yost to stand beside you gently reading the script and handing you tissues to dry your frustrated tears, while continually apologising. The majority of Crain’s art consists of vaguely human-shaped blobs of black and grey attached to a few bright glowy shapes that may or may not be heading towards other vaguely human-shaped blobs of black and grey. Bleh.
The third bad artist in the collection is Larry Stroman, who draws the Bishop mini-series shoved in at the back. Stroman was a mildly popular artist in the 90s who seemed to disappear for a while, before returning to mainstream comics in the past few years, just minus any talent he may or may not have had. I’ve not read any of his 90s work, so I don’t know if he was ever good or not. I find it unlikely given how the early 90s was a nadir of individuality and artistic quality that had everyone trying to draw like one of the Image founders. Stroman’s story-telling is barely adequate, made worse by all his characters looking like partly melted snowmen. At one point he’s required to draw a baby. I think. The script suggests it’s a normal baby, but it’s drawn to look like some kind of evil deformed munchkin creature.
Grousing with the artwork aside, the story’s not too bad. Cable and Hope are still living in the future thanks to a broken time-jump device that allows them to only move further forward into the increasingly fucked up future. Looking for them are Bishop, a rogue X-Man determined to kill Hope before she can bring about the dystopian future he comes from, and X-Force, the X-Men’s wetworks team who want to a) find out what’s happened to Cable and b) kill Bishop. X-Force manage to track Cable’s place in the timestream and jump forward for 24 hours thanks to some primitive time-travel devices that Beast made at some point, I guess. It’s not clear when and how he made them, nor why the X-Men are currently so devoid of time-travel devices given how often super-heroes are flitting around in the timestream. They could just go ask the Fantastic Four – they’ve surely got a time machine lying around. But those are the kind of questions you’re not supposed to ask if you want the story to work.
Anyway, Bishop hooks up with Cable’s evil clone Stryfe (it’s ok, stay with me), who he helps take over and rule the point in the future Cable, Hope and X-Force have just arrived in. And everybody fights.
Bringing in Stryfe is a bit of a daring move as it dredges up all of the convoluted, self-cannibalising, ‘extreme!’ 90s tat that mires Cable’s publishing origins. I think Messiah War manages to get away with it really. Apocalypse is inevitable dragged into things, but it doesn’t get too bogged down in past continuity. All you really need to know is that Stryfe is Cable’s antithesis and has father issues with Apocalypse. I’ve read barely any of the 90s stories that spawned Stryfe and followed everything quite well.
If do you get confused, lost or somehow even interested in any of that stuff though, this trade’s got you covered, as it includes a Messiah War Sourcebook at the back, or, as I like to think of it ‘The X-Office’s Cliff Notes To The 90s!’ The Sourcebook gives profiles on all of the characters involved in the cross-over and tangential other characters and concepts, most of which looks crap and was probably best forgotten, but oh well. The other complaint I have with the Sourcebook is that each of its sections is written from a first person perspective, but whose it is changes between sections and it’s not always clear who’s narrating.
As I mentioned, the other item thrown into the collection is a three issue mini-series about Bishop; a retelling of his entire history, presumably to try and explain why he’s trying to kill Hope. It’s passable, I guess. There’s no getting around the fact that Bishop’s origin also stems from lots of horribly convoluted and kinda crap early-mid 90s stuff. To be fair, I might be looking more favourably on it if it had been drawn by a better artist, but Stroman’s art and Swierczynski’s attempts to delineate it into a clear narrative do little it to suggest it’s worth caring about. It’s also problematic because although it explains Bishop’s motives to the reader, this is the kind of thing he should be telling the X-Men, in attempt to convince them that he’s not just gone insane. The reader’s been aware of his motivation from the beginning of this Cable series, but he’s never actually bothered to try and explain his point of view to the X-Men, which just makes him look a bit obtuse really.
The trouble with the entire collection is that it seems poorly conceived. Although I don’t begrudge the presence of the X-Force characters, given how largely irrelevant the events of this cross-over seem to their title, it would have been better to just run it entirely in issues of Cable, with X-Force as guest stars. That would have at least ensured a more consistent visual element, as the switching between Olivetti and Crain is distracting and awkward. They’re both very different artists, a fact exacerbated by the lack of editorial cohesiveness. The interiors of Stryfe’s throne-room change from a dark, murky underlit, nondescript void under Crain to a bright, empty, dull sandstone room under Olivetti. It’s both artists just playing to their strengths/laziness. The editor of the cross-over should have co-ordinated a solid design on not only that, but the characters involved. Deadpool shows up, but looks entirely different depending on who draws him. Choi & Oback have him looking relatively normal, but in a patchwork costume. Crain has him looking like a zombie, complete with gaping holes in his costume, which Olivetti has sewn back up so he looks entirely normal. And this keeps swinging back and forth. It’s not just the art, either. There are various competing narrative captions from different characters that don’t keep consistent colour schemes from issue to issue. Warpath disappears for almost the entirety of one issue for no reason. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent stance on if Deadpool’s powers are still working. Hope learns both the real and code-names of characters without ever being told them. Her age bounces around all over the place as well, so she looks about 6 in some issues and 12 in others. It’s editorially lax.
The other problem is that if you’re only buying Cable collections , there’s a chance you might entirely miss this volume, given that it’s not included in the series numbering, which is bad as it’s the readers’ first proper look at Hope as a character. If the story had been solely contained in issues of Cable, that could have been avoided (and in an ideal world, McKelvie or Choi & Oback would have drawn the whole story). I suppose the same problem faces X-Force readers, but given how much an inconsequential sidestep this seems for that title, it doesn’t seem as big a problem.
